We have used double facts as our morning match greeting this week. If you have "8 + 8 =" you have to find your match, or sum. Half of the students have the addends in the equation and half of the students have the sum. Children sit next to their match and we go around the oval reading each number sentence left to right; 8 + 8 = (is the same as) 16. We have been trying to see how quickly all of the children can find their match! Morning greeting is full of rich and fun learning, too.
While engaging in a variety of work involving doubles, we have also had ongoing opportunities to count by two's and recognize even numbers. Our work with chick math was inspired by a book Cindy shared with us earlier this Spring. The book lives on the shelf by our gathering rug and continues to be reread by the children - it is a community favorite. Using the children's incredible love for this book to guide our work, we have developed a class chick chart and solved a variety of ongoing journal problems involving chicks on the farm. The love for chicks will be further felt when we hatch our own classroom chicks during the month of May.
In the below photographs WM adds a final label to our chick chart - a document that the children have revisited and recorded noticings on. This chart has recently been used as a tool and reference for solving journal problems.
Ongoing journal work with story problems has provided children with opportunities to think deeply about a story problem; What is the important information they need to use to solve the problem? What is the question - what are they solving for? How do they show their thinking - what does that mean?
In the last few weeks I have included different chick story problems during our number corner work. I have purposefully chosen even numbers. These problems have encouraged children to reflect on and use all of our recent work and experiences to solve the problems. The children have shared their strategies with their peers, but until this week, no one had said that you could take the number of legs and cut the number in half - giving you the number of chicks. These problems have been differentiated by using numbers from 6 - 18.
Children continuously talked about using pictures or "number frames" to solve each problem. It's so interesting to look at their work. It may seem messy at first, but with each cross out or scribble over, we get a glimpse of their method. We see how important it is for children to show their thinking - to represent their process of inquiry and discovery. We learn about each mathematician.
A work sheet with double facts doesn't encourage students to explain or revisit. It doesn't show me that some children need to draw the details of every chick, while others can use what they call a "number frame" to quickly and efficiently solve the problem. When ever an answer is written, I always ask the students to include a label, ensuring their audience knows what the number stands for. This connects our math work to all of our literacy work around labels, hearing sounds in words and writing the corresponding letters, and providing writing an audience can read and understand.
Tully went to the farm to see baby chicks.
He counted 6 legs.
How many chicks did he see?
Show your thinking!
Tully went to the farm to see baby chicks.
He counted 12 legs.
How many chicks did he see?
Show your thinking!
OM shares his work on the document camera. He points to his number frame and states that he noticed 3 if half of 6 - encouraging his peers to begin thinking differently about our chick story problems!
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